New Year’s 2026

I write this in the new year. It is cold (teens or -8C) and clear skies, with about 2 inches of powdery snow. Deborah and I stayed at her house and had a quiet New Year’s.

Starting from the beginning of the last day of 2025 for me, I rose later and just had coffee as we had breakfast with Deborah’s friend Carol in Clawson, Michigan. I did not finish the blog as I had not risen early enough.

I had also popped over to Kaggle.com and looked at the contests and options. I will take the courses for programming (free) just to get my skills sharpened, though I often discover that my skills now do not fade, be it programming or figure painting, and usually are better after a break. Still, it would be good to get credit for taking classes and to see if anything new has come up that I have missed. My Notebook work is a bit weak, too.

One contest involves solving math problems, the annual AI Mathematical Olympiad, which was won by NVIDIA‘s team last year, with a prize of millions of dollars, and already 10,000+ teams are working on it. Another, less well-financed and with fewer teams, is to translate Akkadian into English, which also got my attention. Any solution will involve language handling (the math problems are in LaTeX, and the Akkadian uses obscure Unicode characters), but with limited examples and deep complexity. Just applying an existing Large Language Model is not going to get you there.

The math problem supplies extra powerful servers, which get my attention, too. Love to get my virtual hands on those (for free!). Dear reader, these problems are the edge of technology and fascinate me. Assuming success, having a math problem solver for non-trivial challenges will improve our existing AI, and real-time Akkadian would help us understand the past.

Back to the story, it was still snowing slowly and had been dropping a pretty powder all morning (and would continue until the evening). The traffic is lighter for the holidays (most folks in the car industry and education have the holidays off), and we arrive without issue in Deborah’s mini.

We had a nice chat and breakfast with Carol, though her vegan choices are limited. I had the hash, and Deborah had Eggs Florentine with grits that I regretted missing on the menu, but I had plenty. Carol and Deborah got caught up on various theater items. Carol is still doing local theater.

Next, after Deborah and I said goodbye to Carol, we headed back to Deborah’s house and watched some more shows, and were a bit sleepy from all the breakfast. We luxuriated on Deborah’s couch, watched shows, petted the dogs, and had too much caramel corn (thanks, Kathy and Martin!). Sometimes it feels good to relax and watch the snow fall between binging something on Paramount+ (Elsbeth in this case).

For New Year’s Eve, we headed out after Liam (Deborah’s younger son) had left for a day or so. Donovan (the older son) had a later local party, and we said our “Happy New Year’s” as Deborah and I headed out to find Spanish Coffee.

We found a bar open, and they made a good hot drink, but without whipped cream (which, with the amount of sugar this holiday, was fine). The bar was full of noise from too many screens with the volume on.

We escaped the noise and spent some time together before returning to Deborah’s house, where the dogs were happy to see us. We watched and cried a lot while watching the musical Hamilton (Deborah had not seen it before) on Disney+. Recommended (especially with CC on). I had forgotten how hard the ending of a musical is with its truth-telling.

We kissed, as most folks do, to bring in the New Year. We are excited to be together in 2026.

Back at the hotel after Deborah braved the roads after midnight, I read for a while in 2026, but soon sleep found me (I am still running late as I cannot get used to this time zone).

Thanks for reading! Welcome to 2026!